The International Free Software Forum will be held in Porto Alegre, Brazil from April 19 to 26. On the first day of the event KDE will be holding KDE Afternoon, a talk show hosted by developer Helio Castro and broadcast on Brazilian TV show InfomediaTV. The show will gather together some of KDE's best developers: Aaron Seigo, George Staikos and Zack Rusin. You can follow coverage of the Forum at the InfomediaTV site, including the eye-candy of our developers at KDE Afternoon.

KDE Afternoon

Helio Castro:
KDE developer, research and development at Mandriva and KDE's multimedia
Phonon advocate, primary contact for KDE in Latin America.

George Staikos:
KDE developer and one of the authors of the Konqueror browser's infrastructure. Leading the efforts to standardise security for webbrowsers.

Aaron Seigo:
KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech. Author of Plasma, the project to make the KDE 4 desktop.

Zack Rusin:
KDE and X.org developer. Author of the new Exa layer of X.org and many important enhancements in modern graphic technologies in KDE.

InfomediaTV is a program specialized in the IT area, which is transmitted to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo at NGT, an open UHF channel. All productions are also available at the program's website.

The funny thing is that FISL will happen in one extremity of the country almost completely opposite to me. As Brazil is such a _huge_ country (more than 4000Km wide in _any_ direction) and air tickets are pretty expensive here some people interested in the event will simply not come (me included). Maybe when FISL happens in a more central place (Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte) it will be cheaper. For now it's closed to less-money-powered people. :(

Well, it's impossible to make happy greeks and troyians :)
For me, that liv here in Rio Grande do Sul, it's really good that it happens here, and it's also a good thing it is NOT on "big centers" like Rio on São Paulo, those places already have lots of good conventions, let one of those just be kept here in south :)

But you see, the reason FISL is here is because our previous government from labor party was the first one to really invest and embrace open source and linux, when the state government changed, the labor party took to federal power and kept investing in FISL instead of the state. After that lots of other open source events poped around the country and another states as Paraná support open-source, but as a matter of tradition, we have the honror to hold FISL.

But I really hope that someday not only we have lots of importante free-software events around the country with friends from other countries coming, but more brazilian developers in lots of cities and states get famous enought to be considered stars as those who are coming for FISL.

Well, Olívio Dutra did a good job, and we need more people like him here in Brazil. We developers must foment this kind of mindset and organize ourselves this kind of events, even in regional scale, but spending US$2,000.00 without crossing country's borders just to attend to FISL is a PITA and way too much for Brazilian citizen's financial reality. When I calculated those values my hair went up far higher than Maestro Pletzkaya's (from Tangos E Tragédias' fame - Nós nascemos na Esbórnia! HA!). I even nourished the idea of doing that travel as a hitchhiker. What shoul I do? Cry, maybe. Maybe curse Gol, TAM and Varig. Maybe just sftu and distille my envy alone. :)
I hope these who go to FISL enjoy it a lot, really. These are just ramblings from a money-impaired floss developer. ;)

On that note... are there any KDE Vodcasts yet? Or KDE Vodcast aggregators/media managers? Akregator is great for news, but it doesn't really cut it for media. The best I can find in the Linux world is PenguinTV, but it's still a little rough around the edges and is pretty GNOME-centric.

I live near Porto Alegre (4 hours by bus) and will be there to meet KDE people. I've met Helio and Mattias there in 2004, but wasn't able to go there in 2005 (lack of money).

I hope everbody that comes likes our country and state (Rio Grande do Sul the southest one, near uruguay and argentina).

The FISL is a lot of fun and there are a lot of talk. I had two surprises in 2004, two of my virtual friends (from the time of scifi moo, a lambda moo we have on our university here) where found to be a Slackware Evangelist (Piter Punk) and the chief of OpenOffice in Brazil (Ghost Rider 2099). It's good to go there and meet people who like the same things you do and are all very educated and friendly.

This is probally due the fact that us brazilians kind of speak in PORTUGUESE, and our capital ISN'T Buenos Aires ;)

Sorry, but there is this thing, that most americans (I'm not saying you are one of them) just belives all latin america are like Mexico (nothing wrong with our mexican friends also). But this is already a kind of joke here.

Anyway, you should wait after the KDE day on FISL, that will be next month, to get the video.